John F. Kennedy had a lot of enemies. The CIA, whose Bay of Pigs operation he refused to bail out and whose dismemberment he publicly promised. The military industrial complex, whose Vietnam war he was in the process of ending. Organized crime, whose cooperation his brother was simultaneously prosecuting. And a powerful foreign lobby he was pressuring to register as a foreign agent under FARA, while demanding inspections of a nuclear weapons facility in the Middle East that wasn't supposed to exist. Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath of office on Air Force One before Kennedy's body was cold, quietly dropped every one of those fights within weeks of taking office.
Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial. He was shot dead two days after the assassination by Jack Rubenstein — a nightclub owner with documented ties to organized crime — in the basement of a Dallas police station, on live television, in front of law enforcement. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, firing a magic bullet that changed direction multiple times, passed through two men, and emerged nearly pristine. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1979 that Kennedy was probably killed as the result of a conspiracy. That finding has never been acted upon. When Trump ordered the files released in his first term, the CIA lobbied successfully to keep thousands of pages sealed. They remain sealed today.
This is the collection for everyone who knows there are lines that not even a sitting president can cross twice.
